2017: The year CanLit courted controversy
Questions of writer’s heritage and cultural appropriation turned more than pages
The word “controversial” is rarely associated with Canadian literature and publishing. Earnest, yes, but controversial? That perception changed in 2017 when two high-profile controversies dragged the polite, riskadverse world of CanLit into the media and public spotlight.
The year began with the amplification of a controversy that actually began late in 2016, when the Aboriginal People’s Television Network published an article on award-winning novelist and defender of First Nations rights Joseph Boyden.
In the article, investigative journalist Jorge Barrera questioned Boyden’s much-publicized Indigenous heritage, citing a lack of evidence and the author’s own contradictory accounts of his ancestry.
When Boyden denied the allegations via Twitter and in an interview with the Star, several high-profile figures came to his aid, but as 2017 wore on public opinion turned against the author, who didn’t help his case by penning a vociferously defensive Maclean’s editorial.
The issue of cultural appropriation also incited another media storm, this time over an editorial in Write, a magazine few Canadians had heard of before. The quarterly journal of the Writers’ Union of Canada, Write had dedicated its spring issue to Indigenous authors. So far, so good.
The controversy arose from editor Hal Niedzviecki’s introduction to the issue, in which he encouraged authors of all backgrounds to appropriate each other’s identities and cultures. He even cheekily called for the creation of a cultural appropriation prize, an idea that was picked up by several media commentators, including then-Walrus editor Jonathan Kay.
Public consensus deemed the idea of the award offensive and ill-timed, and both editors soon found themselves out of work.
Even the fall literary-prize season did not pass without a frisson of controversy.
Speaking to a journalist about the dominance of issue-oriented books on the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize list, André Alexis, a juror for this year’s Giller Prize, called out the Writers’ Trust jurors for “emphasiz (ing) the political content of the work, whereas the Giller Prize was emphasizing simply books that we thought were well-written and that we could defend on esthetic terms.” Ouch! Another simmering issue, more of concern to authors than readers, was finally resolved, at least temporarily. In July, Access Copyright, a collective that delivers copyright royalties to Canadian authors, artists and publishers, won a protracted court case against York University over unpaid fees. Unfortunately, York appealed the verdict in August, leaving the legal stalemate in place and the fees unpaid.
Author and Writers Union executive director John Degen, a longtime advocate for fair compensation, brought the copyright issue to the fore when he mailed a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to Julia Reda, a German politician who complained that there no free copies of the classic text available in the public domain. The inevitable Twitter war also remains unresolved. It wasn’t all controversy. While the issue of cultural appropriation was dominating the media, several exciting new and established Indigenous authors were quietly racking up glowing reviews, and award nominations and victories.
Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize while Cherie Dimaline’s YA novel The Marrow Thieves won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Young People’s Literature and the prestigious (and lucrative) Kirkus Prize in the U.S. On the poetry front, Jordan Abel’s collection Injun won the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Unfortunately, the community lost one of its most respected and celebrated voices, the Ojibway author Richard Wagamese, who died in his home in Kamloops, B.C., at age 61.
A journalist, memoirist and the author of several novels, including the brilliant Indian Horse, Wagamese was the child of residential school survivors who endured a childhood of poverty, racism and foster homes.
Jack Rabinovitch, the founder and benefactor of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the most coveted and glamorous literary award in Canada, died in Toronto at the age of 87.
Rabinovitch, who grew up with Mordecai Richler in Montreal’s St. Urbain neighbourhood, named the award after his late wife, the journal- ist Doris Giller.
His daughter Elana, the long-time executive director for the prize gala, took her late father’s place at the podium for the first time in November and acquitted herself admirably, a good omen for the Giller’s future.
The writing and publishing communities lost several other luminaries, including Stuart McLean, creator of the much-loved The Vinyl Café radio program and books, and Leonard Cohen, a man who needed no introduction. Novelists Richard B. Wright (79), Bonnie Burnard (72) and Norah McClintock (64) also died, as did Avie Bennett (89), the former publisher of McClelland & Stewart, and Groundwood Books publisher Sheila Barry.
It was also the Year of Margaret Atwood, as two of her novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, were adapted into successful TV series, the latter by Sarah Polley.
The much feted Atwood also won the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
When not busy picking up awards and royalty cheques, Atwood helped launch the Canadian arm of Audible, Amazon’s popular audiobook platform. Digital audiobooks have proved to be an increasingly popular item for book lovers, spurring ebook retailer Kobo and the publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House Canada to launch their own lists of Canadian titles in 2017. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.
Indigenous authors racked up glowing reviews, and award nominations and victories